So while I was writing the script for Government: Earth I think the left side of my brain started to hurt from overuse and I ended up recording this, and kinda worked on them both at the same time.
so what happens if i don’t live forever? (also how i became an athiest [extremely abridged])
aaron moritz, July 11th 2010When I was in 7th grade my religion teacher told the class that it was ok to be gay, but that having gay sex was a sin. Tell any 12 year old kid he can’t have sex (well, the kind he wants to have) and you lose ‘em. And Catholicism lost me. But that didn’t mean there was no God, not for sure anyway. I was content, for many years, to think that the church just gets some things wrong, that of course, an ever loving God would never send me to hell for sucking a dick (especially when he’s the one who made me want to do it…)
So I embraced my agnosticism, which by the time I graduated, had turned more into a quasi-spiritual pick and choose belief system when I got into mysticism and spirit guides and healing (note: not heavily into , I was just… browsing), and now my stance is basically… wait and see. But my intuition is that there is no afterlife.
The more ‘atheist’ I became, the more I began to feel free. There was no God watching and judging everything I do. I am the ultimate judge of myself. I am the only person with that power, truly. I once mentioned I was an atheist to a casual acquaintance and he said “…must be lonely sometimes.” I never looked at it that way. The only thing atheism has given me is less guilt, and a feeling of purpose.
I’ve been digging into Transhumanism for a while now, and I’ve become fairly persuaded by the evidence that we are developing technologies that will radically extend our lives (possibly until the end of the universe[or the beginning of the next one]). But lot’s of people like to say that this is nothing more than technologists wishful thinking, their own scientific version of religion, creating heaven on earth, rapture of the nerds some people have called it. And until I see the actual technologies working, on humans, I can’t have 100% confidence that they aren’t wrong. So what happens if I do die?
Well, I was an atheist (well, let’s say… 96% atheist. There’s always a chance the theists are right) before I stumbled upon transhumanism and my stance on death hasn’t changed much. If death is inevitable, then all that means is that this life is more precious. There is no garuntee, or even reason to think, that there is anything after this life. So make each moment count. And don’t worry about dying, because if you do die, you’ll either be starting on some great adventure, or you’ll be nothing, like before you were born.
Top Ten Reasons Global Revolution WILL Happen
aaron moritz, July 4th 201010. Peak Oil:
Everything plastic or rubber is made of oil. Oil fuels our transport, our trade, our economy. Our entire civilization is based on the use of fossil fuels for both energy and materials.
There are ways to fix these problems, but since we’re barely even attempting to implement them, the problems associate with depleting oil are escalating.
9. Bio Engineering:
We’re learning so much about how our bodies function at such a fast rate, that the applications seem almost science fiction, like the recently developed ‘bionic eye’ for blind people, a small camera either implanted into the eye socket or word on glasses that wirelessly sends a signal to an implant behind your ear, which interfaces with your brain to produce an image (see video here). If we can replace an eye, why not a heart? Or a brain (after transferring the data, of course)?
We are experimenting with being able to switch genes on and off. We are learning to literally grow tissues, or even entire organs in a lab, and implant them. We are learning to reverse the biological processes of aging. We are on the brink of attaining an unprecedented amount of control over our biology and the biology of our descendants. This raises many questions that are unique to our times and deserve a lot of discussion.
8. The Emerging Global Police State:
International Bankers, largely based in and in control of the United States and the other central UN nations are quietly imposing new laws that restrict people’s freedoms ad create an environment of fear, which leads to submission. But people will only accept so much, sometimes all too many of their freedoms to be taken away before being pushed to the brink, but there always is a brink. And the confused, power-hungry, fear mongers are always pushing the limits.
The illusion of freedom and democracy that has enshrouded the western world is dissipating due to many of the other factors listed here.
7. Technological Unemployment:
It started when tractors replaced farm workers. Then the people who built the tractors were replaced by automated factories. So everyone moved to the service industry, but now we have ATM’s and automated restaurants and waiters and vending machines.
The fact, is that in any industry, the more we automate the work (ie; assign it to machines rather than humans), the more efficiently the work is done. Machines are stealing our jobs (and they’re better at them, too)!!!! That’s why we can’t keep people employed. There isn’t enough work for them to do, and since they can’t work, they can’t spend, so companies has to cut costs, fire more people, further diminish the purchasing power of the individual. You see the diminishing returns here. This type of loop cannot be sustained.
We’ve ignored this (shifted people to new industries) for almost 80 years, and it’s finally starting to catch up to us (there really isn’t much work left for us to do).
6. Between 10% and 20% of the World’s Population is Starving:
and the global wealth gap is widening, which will only increase this number. As Citibank stated in their leaked internal memo, while they have successfully achieved the accumulation of power through monetary means, government, unfortunately still remains a one person one vote power structure. This clearly shows the mindset of the super-wealthy, who could easily afford to feed everyone on the planet, but choose, instead, due to their conditioning, to allow people to starve, tacitly allowing millions of deaths every day.
I wonder how far they think they can push it, before people start to say enough is enough. I know I’m already saying it. And so are a lot of other people.
5. AI:
Many parts of the brain have been modeled. Neural networks have been simulated. We don’t yet have all the processing power and neural models available to ‘build a brain’, but the pieces are falling together, if you pay attention to the news in that area. Ray Kurzweil projects we will have human level machine intelligence by 2029.
If a robot has the ability to react, discuss, argue that it is conscious and can feel, who would we be to say that it doesn’t? What if it has had the memories of a loved one transferred into it? The philosophical and intellectual debate this poses over what it means to be ‘alive’ or ‘conscious’ has the ability to fundamentally alter our perspectives on what it means to be a human. If that’s not revolutionary I don’t know what is.
4. Environmental Crisis:
Whether global warming is man made or not, we need to take care of our planet and our environment holistically. Failure to do this will inevitably result in environmental catastrophe. When this happens, something big is going to need to change.
3. The Flopping Global Economy:
The world-wide debt balloon is bursting. There are signs of it everywhere, world leaders are meeting to discuss it, and coming up with no real answers, just empty targets that won’t be met, and wouldn’t help even if they were met. A market economy is based on growth, but we only have one planet. It and the amount of resources on it are not growing, so we can’t keep using them at an accelerated rate.
The fact is that we live in a global Ponzi scheme, an upsidedown pyramid that is about to tip one way or the other. We need an ‘economic’ system that is based on the holistic management of the entire earth, it’s life, and it’s resources.
2. Nanotechnology:
Nanotechnology brings the promise of being able to manipulate matter at the level of molecules. In Eric Drexler’s Engine’s of Creation, a seminal book on Nanotech, he describes nano-scale assemblers that would have the ability to arrange matter in any way (ie; make apple pie from thin air, simply by re arranging the molecules). How is the economy going to work when everyone can have any material possessions they want at only the cost of raw materials?
Nanotechnology also carries with it the promise of being able to upgrade our human bodies. More efficient neurons, better red blood cells, better internal defense systems for healing cuts and bruises.
Nanotechnology takes it’s cue from our own molecular machinery (cells and the like), yet allows us to manipulate and improve upon it. It will likely also function as a catalyst for both AI, and is intermingled with Bio Engineering, in my opinion.
1. The Internet, ie: The Freedom and Spread of Information:
Hey guess what everyone? The United States and every member of it’s empire and most of the rest of the world is living in a Police State (see #8). We are not free, not in action, not in the choice of our governments or money masters.
But we all know that. We haven’t all been tricked, and we’re telling each other about what’s happening. We’re working right in front of their faces to remove them from power. Until about ten years ago, they were very effective at controlling public opinion. We all thought what the TV told us to, we all thought what was on TV was real. Now we know it’s just reality television, a drama played out for our amusement and distraction.
How do we know? Because we’re making our own videos, we’re learning how to think from each other, rather than from a single source, and that is unfortunate for anyone who wants things to stay the same. The printing press caused a revolution due to it’s ability to spread information. The internet does this on a scale many orders of magnitude larger, so should we expect that the resulting revolution will also be on a scale many orders of magnitutde larger?
Any one of these things has the potential to start a monumental revolution, either of the mind, or of our external environment. The fact that they are all happening at the same time is why I feel confident in saying that something big is coming.
What should we do about it? Well, if you ask me, I like the direction of the Zeitgeist Movement. To me it seems like the most reasonable option we have left.
Science, Wonder, and the Beauty of What’s Real
aaron moritz, June 18th 2010The struggle to find meaning in life seems almost to be a basic human impulse. Those who choose to engage in that struggle will find it both difficult and rewarding.
Finding true meaning, for me, doesn’t come from made up stories, or from superstitious, mystical explanations of consciousness and the universe. It comes, simply, from the inherently staggering beauty of nature, and from the puzzles and contradictions that arise the deeper we examine it. It is the thrill of finding truth, an answer to a question.
When I attempt to comprehend the totality of our unusual, subtle, and elegant universe I feel ecstatic to be a part of it. I almost feel like walking around, proselytizing to anyone I meet of the great joy I feel to be on this earth, full of hundreds of beautiful species, each the current pinnacle of their own evolution.
Contemplating nature, I sometimes feel like I’ve tapped into a power greater than myself and I can feel it’s love flow through me, fill my soul and spill out into the world around me. I can glimpse the fullness of perfection and realize that wherever we find it’s absence in our world, we should strive to implement and exemplify it. I am utterly connected, and surrendered, to the absolute. The infinity of existence.
I could go on and on, but at the end there I kind of lost my steam. The words stopped naturally flowing from this caffeine buzz I’m riding and I started using random abstract concepts that sound nice, but don’t really mean much. But the language is powerful. Humans have this amazing ability to channel the essence of our emotions into words. The thing is, words can get confused.
So, basically, I am Jesus. Wait. Not literally. What I mean is, I could sit and make up a million different ways to say, basically, ‘I’m feeling good, I want to sustain that feeling and share it with others. And I want to encourage others and myself to do only good things.’ You know, the stuff Jesus talked about, spreading the love. Except for Scientology, which, of course, we all know started as a money making scheme by science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in the 1950’s, most religions probably start with a normal person, an endorphin rush, and some unique circumstances. Anyone could be Jesus. We all experience this love and we all have the ability to share it.
One thing I really do wonder about, though, is why none of these religious founders ever taught that we humans ourselves are the source of this great, infinite love. Just us. Except for maybe Buddhism (I’m not too clear on how that whole thing works), typical religious training is that some being greater than ourselves must be responsible for our love.
I don’t believe in a ‘power’ greater than myself. I am the greatest thing this universe has ever created and so are you. I exalt in the realization that my consciousness is just a transcendent property of my neurons firing, unique to me and my physical brain. Giving credit to a non-physical soul would cheapen the stunningly complex, yet simplistic nature of what we are. Atoms dancing with each other.
Because we are just atoms, and through how they interact, we are able to know ourselves, and learn about our universe. Sadly, this amazing gift is rarely nurtured. People are kept ignorant. The joy of discovering the truths of our world is robbed from children, their education reduced to a mind-numbing game of question/answer regurgitation. Children should be led down a self-directed path of
discovery, allowing them to freely explore their curiosities with a wealth of information at their feet. Not graded and compared, or made to compete and experience humiliation for failing to learn fast enough.
The most successful tool we have for discovering what is true is the scientific method. And yeah, the scientific method is strict, very strict, because if we want the truth, it has to be. It demands proofs and repetitions, continued experiment and revision. Truth is beauty and truth is power and science works because it is self-aware, self-correcting, and utterly devoted to the truth.
But being strict does not mean that science has to be cold and uninspired. The spiritual and philosophical power of what has already been discovered should not be dismissed. Us, plants, animals, water, the air, all of nature, all of almost everything, is made up of atoms forged inside of stars. This is a fact. Also, every being on the planet gets it’s energy, in one way or another, from the sun. As Carl Sagan put it, “We are star stuff harvesting star light”.
It is humbling to realize that beings as complex and experiential as we, could, and did, evolve slowly over time through nothing more than subtle interactions between atoms, exchanges of force particles and photons, gluons, quarks, and neutrino’s. The universe dancing with itself. When we get down even smaller, many physicists think that all these particles are made up of strings. All the strings are the same ‘stuff’, they just vibrate, and resonate with each other in unique harmonious ways (through ten spacial dimensions no less!), and from those harmonies the natural world unfolds. The orchestra has been building for 15 billion years, and it looks to me like we might be at a crescendo.
We currently face a choice. Will we continue this battle we rage against our own species? Become extinct, a sour note, allowing the symphony to continue on without us? Because it will. The fall of
humanity would be but a minor stumble, a single trumpet player faltering for just a moment, when we consider the vastness of this universal production. Or do we learn to resonate with one another, as our atoms and our strings do, and create music so beautiful that some seem to think it impossible, or unimaginable?
I find that sad, because I don’t just imagine this beauty, I can see it, read about it. Science has shown that humanities long-felt, deep connection to nature is a real and tangible thing. We are all dependent on each other: plants turn sunlight into our food and we spread their seeds, they breathe in our CO2 and we breathe in their Oxygen. Bees that pollinate flowers, bacteria that help us to digest our food, animals that eat each other… everywhere we look we seem natural examples of living things being ‘plugged in’ to one another.
These realities raise our consciousness above vague, spiritual statements on connectedness. They empower us with the realization that we are physically, demonstrably, and irrevocably intertwined. We are extensions of one another, aspects of one planetary organism. We have come to see nature as neither a force to be reckoned with, nor an enemy to be vanquished. Nature is a set of highly interdependent variables that when broken down into smaller components can be known, recorded, understood, and ultimately influenced and maneuvered. This is what science shows us. This is the power we have been discovered to be holding.
Facing the future and all of it’s uncertainty, the search for truth through science, and it’s humanistic application to the way we live our lives, could be the key in the engine of the next revolution. A global, but personal and truthful revolution that implements institutions not of power, but of facts, and truth.
First Person Experience of Body Transfer in Virtual Reality
aaron moritz, June 10th 2010This is very low tech, but actual full immersion virtual reality is more and more becoming a reality.
It’s really interesting how easily these guys were made to identify with their virtual female bodies.
I truly believe that right now, we can’t exist without our physical bodies because the information in our brains (biological computers) can’t be copied. Not yet. But that’s really all we are, information. Memories, emotions, patterns of behaviour. Once we can access that information, interface with our computers, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to back up that information. Perhaps ‘run the program’ in one of billions of possible digital environments, we can literally create new world to explore. Extend the existence of our ‘selves’ past where our physical body can take us. Not through magic, but using technology. Not through some unknowable greatness, but through our own ingenuity.
Even through all the war and genocide rampaging across our planet, I can’t help but be humbled by the people who plunge on, continuing to discover new things, adding to the growing base of human knowledge. And once people can stop wasting their times at jobs manufactured to sustain a dying system, they’ll be able to collaborate on ideas and to create and study without the disgusting restrictions put on researchers by patents, and on artists by copyrights. The speed at which we would flourish could be astounding.
Carl Sagan: great scientist, writer, thinker, marijuana user
aaron moritz, May 16th 2010When I first read “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” about a year ago, I was (and am, constantly) undergoing a transformation in the way I think about the world. That book hit me hard, and it sured up a lot of things I’d kinda been feeling, but unable to put into words.
He wrote this amazing essay, as “Mr. X” (having to hide his name for fear of committing public and career suicide), about his own personal marijuana use and he even mentions that it helped with some of his scientific insights.
link to his essay
Here are a few video’s from youtube, if you’re like me, and are too young to remember him being on TV, and don’t know who I’m talking about.
-oh wow I just finished watched this one again as I searched for it on youtube. all the shit that we do to each other… i don’t know, this video just puts things into perspective.
-Carl on his PBS show ‘Cosmo’s’ explaining the fourth dimension.
Imprisonment pt.2: Bigger Cages / Longer Chains
aaron moritz, May 12th 2010Jobs, Schools, Media, National Borders, what other names can we think of for prisons?
Relevent links:
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com
http://thevenusproject.com
http://www.youtube.com/user/Tzmsocial… –great resource for Venus Project technical info!!
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLeftLi… -Big inspiration for both this video and my last, maybe even to the point of a bit of word-borrowing. Hope you don’t mind, friend.
http://www.youtube.com/user/cveitch – Again, huge inspiration in my life over the last few months, and in both my videos. Thanks Charlie (and Danny!!! I miss you.).
Music:
1. Couer de Pirate – Comme Les Enfants
2. The Wire (Closing Credits)
3. eDit – Ashtray
4. Nine Inch Nails – A Warm Place
Video made with Adobe Premiere and After Effects (you can see me trying out some animation stuff of my own on here). Again, youtube and google image were my two major sources of video.
Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it
aaron moritz, May 9th 2010This is a couple years old already, and considering how much I like TED and how much I like the idea of avoiding aging, I was surprised to see I hadn’t seen this before.
I know it’s kinda long, but really listen to what the guy’s saying. If we could just get the funding, we can make this happen. Now.
Not enough money. Story of the Century.
Paralyzed limbs revived by ‘hacking’ into nerves
aaron moritz, April 26th 2010When you get a spinal cord injury, basically your brain is still sending out the signals to your legs to move, and your legs still have the muscles to move (at least initially, until they deteriorate from non-use), the only problem is that the connection is severed. The signals can’t get where their supposed to be going.
So, what do we do? Reconnect the nerves to something that you can use to control them? Seems like a simple answer that probably isn’t too easy to implement, which is why I fucking bow down to all those who work tirelessly at SOLVING PROBLEMS, like this one.
Because you’d think solving problems is what our “leaders” (I put leaders in quotes to remind everyone how completely and fucking utterly ridiculous the whole notion of a ‘leader’ is, i can’t even use it in a sentence without feeling the need to point this out or something) might be doing, but no, our leaders are busy arguing over abortion, gay marriage, who to bomb and how to not get bombed (if you aren’t best buddies with the US like we are, of course), whether it’s ‘time’ for a black president, are we being too capitalistic or not enough, was it the liberals fault or the conservatives, this and that, this and that.
It’s all meaningless bullshit when you realize what people like Matthew Schiefer, a neural engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, are doing. They’re curing paralysis. I was talking about that group yesterday who’s using gene therapy to cure blindness. This is the important news. This is what should be in the papers. Nobody even understands how fast our world is changing because they’re busy wondering ‘should we make weed legal?”.
Let’s stop politicking, and start solving problems.
Making the blind see: Gene therapy restores vision in mice
aaron moritz, April 23rd 2010link -
For all the horror stories you hear about what genetic engineering could do to our species, there’s still awesome shit like this. Gene therapy curing blindness. This is amazing, this should be celebrated, and it should be tested and applied to humans as quickly as possible.
I wonder how much that is going to cost? I mean, I’m sure that we have the resources, but money, maybe there’s not enough. Not to do it quickly anyway. Seems strange. The ability that some would’ve called magic back in Jesus’ day is in development, but taking its time, cause it might affect profit margins.
